Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits

A 25-year health campaign was misplaced outside the continent of Africa. But
the disease still kills more than all wars and conflicts

By Jeremy Laurance
Sunday, 8 June 2008

A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health
Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual
pandemic has disappeared.


In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy
promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de
Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no
generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the
battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the
virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations
everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was
confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting
drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

Dr De Cock said: "It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic
in other countries. Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be
a generalised epidemic in Asia - China was the big worry with its huge
population. That doesn't look likely. But we have to be careful. As an
epidemiologist it is better to describe what we can measure. There could be
small outbreaks in some areas."

In 2006, the Global Fund for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis, which provides
20 per cent of all funding for Aids, warned that Russia was on the cusp of a
catastrophe. An estimated 1 per cent of the population was infected, mainly
through injecting drug use, the same level of infection as in South Africa
in 1991 where the prevalence of the infection has since risen to 25 per
cent.

Dr De Cock said: "I think it is unlikely there will be extensive
heterosexual spread in Russia. But clearly there will be some spread."

Aids still kills more adults than all wars and conflicts combined, and is
vastly bigger than current efforts to address it. A joint WHO/UN Aids report
published this month showed that nearly three million people are now
receiving anti-retroviral drugs in the developing world, but this is less
than a third of the estimated 9.7 million people who need them. In all there
were 33 million people living with HIV in 2007, 2.5 million people became
newly infected and 2.1 million died of Aids.

Aids organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund, have
come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people infected,
diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria, spending it on the
wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather than condoms, and
failing to build up health systems.

Dr De Cock labelled these the "four malignant arguments" undermining support
for the global campaign against Aids, which still faced formidable
challenges, despite the receding threat of a generalised epidemic beyond
Africa.

Any revision of the threat was liable to be seized on by those who rejected
HIV as the cause of the disease, or who used the disease as a weapon to
stigmatise high risk groups, he said.

"Aids still remains the leading infectious disease challenge in public
health. It is an acute infection but a chronic disease. It is for the very,
very long haul. People are backing off, saying it is taking care of itself.
It is not."

Critics of the global Aids strategy complain that vast sums are being spent
educating people about the disease who are not at risk, when a far bigger
impact could be achieved by targeting high-risk groups and focusing on
interventions known to work, such as circumcision, which cuts the risk of
infection by 60 per cent, and reducing the number of sexual partners.

There were "elements of truth" in the criticism, Dr De Cock said. "You will
not do much about Aids in London by spending the funds in schools. You need
to go where transmission is occurring. It is true that countries have not
always been good at that."

But he rejected an argument put in The New York Times that only $30m (£15m)
had been spent on safe water projects, far less than on Aids, despite
knowledge of the risks that contaminated water pose.

"It sounds a good argument. But where is the scandal? That less than a third
of Aids patients are being treated - or that we have never resolved the safe
water scandal?"

One of the danger areas for the Aids strategy was among men who had sex with
men. He said: " We face a bit of a crisis [in this area]. In the
industrialised world transmission of HIV among men who have sex with men is
not declining and in some places has increased.

"In the developing world, it has been neglected. We have only recently
started looking for it and when we look, we find it. And when we examine HIV
rates we find they are high.

"It is astonishing how badly we have done with men who have sex with men. It
is something that is going to have to be discussed much more rigorously."

The biggest puzzle was what had caused heterosexual spread of the disease in
sub-Saharan Africa - with infection rates exceeding 40 per cent of adults in
Swaziland, the worst-affected country - but nowhere else.

"It is the question we are asked most often - why is the situation so bad in
sub-Saharan Africa? It is a combination of factors - more commercial sex
workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population
and concurrent sexual partnerships."

"Sexual behaviour is obviously important but it doesn't seem to explain
[all] the differences between populations. Even if the total number of
sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there
seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships creating
sexual networks that, from an epidemiological point of view, are more
efficient at spreading infection."

Low rates of circumcision, which is protective, and high rates of genital
herpes, which causes ulcers on the genitals through which the virus can
enter the body, also contributed to Africa's heterosexual epidemic.

But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.

"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection
among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North
Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you
explain such differences?"

On Sun, 8 Jun 2008 08:02:58 -0500, "Death" <Death@yourdoor.net> wrote:

Quoted from The Independent
<http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/threat-of-world-aids-pandemic-among-heterosexuals-is-over-report-admits-842478.html>.

Statistics and other evidence shows that HIV is predominantly a
disease of blacks and gays. But can a virus really discriminated in
such a way?

No.

The fictional character Sherlock Holmes once said "...when you have
eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must
be the truth."

Given the amount of time, money and effort put into HIVAIDS it seems
improbable it's all based on a lie. However, when you look closely at
the HIVAIDS theory it crumbles to nothing and the truth that remains
is that HIV does not cause AIDS. AIDS tends to show up in the same
core 'risk groups' time and time again because it's related to
behaviour and circumstance.

HIVAIDS in poor parts of the world, such as African, is caused by
poverty. The HIVAIDS term was forced on them by gays in rich
countries to prove the myth that 'anyone can get HIVAIDS.'

HIVAIDS in richer countries is caused by behaviour.

Unfortunately the aptly named Dr De Cock doesn't go so far as to admit
that HIV does not cause AIDS, but it's clear the writing's on the
wall.
--
<http://www.hiv-poz.co.uk/>
4,895 days and counting...